Booker club: Last Orders by Graham Swift

Continuing his occasional series on rereading the Booker prize winners, Sam Jordison considers the 1996 champion, Last Orders, and finds that while the debate about Swift's debt to Faulkner is absurd, the novel's flawed vernacular makes it a weak winner

Last Orders, a quiet, delicate and gently moving book about four friends disposing of another friend's ashes, has had a strange afterlife as one of the Man Booker prize's most controversial winners.

The trouble started six months after the book won the award, when an academic called John Frow wrote in the Australian Review of Books that he saw marked similarities between Swift's novel and William Faulkner's deep south story about the disposal of a corpse, As I Lay Dying:

"The simple fact is that Last Orders, in its plot and formal structure, is almost identical to that novel, without acknowledgement and without even, as far as I can see, the kind of knowing nod towards the earlier novel that would have made this acceptable. These are tricky issues, but the borrowing (if that's the right word) is substantial."

The correct response to such criticism is: "Who gives a shit?" Writers are supposed to borrow from other writers, have always borrowed from other writers, and always will borrow from other writers. Literature would be nowhere without it. Imagine if Shakespeare had had to endure such strictures, for instance. Besides, imitation is flattery; the very fact that Frow picked up on the similarities shows how well it was working as homage. "Homage", incidentally, being just the word Swift used in an interview with Salon magazine nearly a full year before before Frow started complaining – and even before Swift won the Booker. The full quote is instructive:

"I admire Faulkner very much, and there are obvious similarities between the narrative – although I have my jar of ashes, Faulkner has his rotting corpse, and the setting is clearly very different. So without my having begun the book – or continued writing it – with that novel constantly in my mind, I think there is a little homage at work."

And that should have been all there was to say. But of course, in 1997, Booker-bashing was as much a national sport as it is now. Journalists whipped the story up into a scandal, and one of the judges, AN Wilson, weighed in, writing a letter to the Independent in which he said: "Together with the other 1996 Booker judges, I have been made to look pretty silly … Had the Australian's devastating critique of Last Orders been brought to our attention before the meeting, I have no doubt that the 1996 Booker prize would have been awarded to Margaret Atwood."

The fact that (as he admitted) Atwood was Wilson's first choice all along is entirely beside the point. Or not. The whole thing is farcical. But at least the absurd debate gives writers like myself plenty to say about what would otherwise be a fairly unassuming prize winner.

For this is a novel that works primarily on a domestic scale – especially if you count the pub as an extension of the front room. There is little of the strange magic that makes Swift's novel Waterland so remarkable, with its wonderful atmospherics and frequently lurid tales of eels, incest and ale. Last Orders feels far more confined and prosaic. Aside from brief (and largely unwanted) adventures in the second world war, the lead characters have spent their lives around the same few streets in south London, mainly marking time. They have variously worked in a failing butcher's shop, a car dealership, an undertaker's, as an office clerk. Their lives are as unremarkable as yours and mine – and as fascinating.

Swift does a fine job of teasing out their human entanglements; their conflicts, repressed anger and regrets. They are people who, as Swift puts it, frequently "clam up" and step back from expressing their deepest thoughts. But the novelist ensures you hear plenty in their silence. The sense of hidden truth – of repressions and cover-ups and gradual revelation – makes the book not only gripping in an understated way, but also emotionally satisfying. It's clearly the work of a fine writer.

I did have a problem though, right from the very first sentence, which reads: "It aint like your regular sort of day." It's a striking enough opening and, viewed retrospectively, a witty summary of the rest of the book, which takes place over the course of one fraught day. Yet, for me, that sentence didn't ring true. Graham Swift grew up in south London, and presumably knows the local habits and speech patterns better than – say – Martin Amis knows Lionel Asbo's. But there's something that doesn't quite click. His colloquialisms and slang and deliberately simplistic language all seem a bit cor-blimey-guvnor. I'll be amazed if I ever read a novel with more "aints" per page. (I just turned to page 63, for instance, and found: "June aint my sister. I aint got no sister … I aint going to be a butcher never, it aint what I'm trying to be.")

As John Mullan delicately put it: "In Last Orders, there is sometimes the danger of hearing the TV demotic of Only Fools and Horses or EastEnders." Or as AN Wilson noted more bluntly in the same letter to the Independent quoted above: "The ersatz Bermondsey 'characters' had as much plausibility as Kipling's Cockney rhymes. One began to imagine the embarrassment of reading this stuff to a real Bermondsey butcher." This time, Wilson has a point. The novel's voice is flawed. And it's that, rather than any nonsense about plagiarism, that makes it seem a relatively weak Booker prize winner – and far from Swift's best work.